Gone Astray
by Vulgarities
Summary: Drabble responses to the Month Astray prompt challenges. Updated sporadically, if at all. // All Badou wanted was to do his laundry. The Hardcore Twins have other ideas.
1. A Dollar's Worth of Fun

**Author's Notes:** A DOGS drabble for the third prompt of the DOGS prompt challenge. Badou is incredibly fun to write. Also, writing the twin's dialogue gives me a heavache.

BUT FIRST, A HAIKU. 

Pink and black spinning

blurs that giggle constantly.

Giovanni sighs.

A man sits naked in a laundromat.

This is incorrect. A man sits _in his underwear_ in a laundromat, but this is solely because a short little old woman threatened to beat him with her purse, which happened to weigh about forty pounds. He can always leave his underwear to fester for another week.

In a squalid maze of concrete that passes for a city, in a crumbling little neighborhood, in a smoke stained laundromat in a filthy plastic chair, Badou Nails waits for his pants to get clean.

This, in itself, is hardly unusual. It happens every week. Sometimes twice, if somebody just _happens_ to bleed on him on a Wednesday. He comes to this one most of the time because the other patrons are few and the small thin man behind the counter doesn't ask questions. Either people in the area do their laundry by hand, or they're willing to forgo hygiene for safety. Children in this neighborhood don't tend to last long.

Which is why Badou is mildy surprised when two small girls bounce into the room. They look familiar in a way he can't place, and a niggling feeling at the back of his mind tells him that he doesn't want to. The matching combinations of pink and black strike him as familiar, and somehow make him think of siblinghood.

But, decrepit as his memory might be from years of blunt force trauma, falling from great heights, more toxins than he can name, and more blunt force, he knows deep in his soul that his brother never wore a pink, fluffy dress.

Shrugging and leaning back to doze off once more (Badou Nails is the only specimen known to be able to sleep and smoke at the same time. Research will be conducted as soon funding arrives...), he put the two out of his mind.

They, it seemed, had other ideas.

"Hey, look! It's Not-"

"-Not Quite Big Brother!"

A single eye cracked open.

"He's almost as fun as Big Brother Haine!"

"Maybe he'll play with us!"

With a grunt of surrender, Badou lifted himself back up, coming face to face with two yellow eyes an inch or two away from his face. Stifling a squeak of surprise, he looked at his options. He didn't like _normal_ kids, what was the upside to creepy, sentence-finishing ones? Besides, they mentioned Haine. Nobody who mentioned Haine to him had anything nice planned.

On the other hand, his clothes were still in the washer, and running across town in his boxers would only appeal to him after enough alchohol to choke a horse.

_Or horse-mutant child_, he thought grimly. Whatever you find in the city, nowadays.

The one in pink, standing to his left, squealed and shoved her face closer to his. "Will you play-"

"-Play with us, Sort Of Big Brother?" Finished the one on his right, wearing mostly black.

He grunted. "I thought it was 'Not Quite Big Brother'."

The two looked at each other quizzically. "It can be-"

"-Can be both! Or-"

"-Or something else!"

These two were giving him a headache.

The one in black threw her arms up. "So, will you play-"

"-Play with us?"

"Kind of Maybe Brother?" They finished in time, grinning from ear to ear.

Badou just grunted again. He stood up and turned around, trying to ignore the sounds of underage girls inspecting his underwear. He'd ruined people's reputations on less evidence.

It was a little hard to take them seriously when their only comments were:

"Ooh, Noki, what's this called?"

"It's called blue, stupid!"

"That's not nice, Noki! And I meant the pattern on top of it."

"I'm sorry, Luki. It's called plaid!"

"Plaid? But I thought it was called tartan?"

Reaching underneath his soaking pants to the curve of the washer, he pulled out a fistful of lost quarters and shut the machine again to get on with it's job. Tar and blood don't come out very easily.

He counted out two dollars, yellow and black eyes following each quarter as it dropped from his right to his left hand. Eight quarters in hand, he held it out to them.

"There. A buck for each of you. Now go away somewhere and find a dollar's worth of fun."

With joyful screeches they fell on his outstretched palm like magpies, snatching what the could and then running away.

"What do you want to do, Luki?"

"I don't know, Noki! What can we do-"

"-Do for a dollar? Well, we could-"

"-We could get candy, or change them for pennies-"

"-Pennies and throw them at stray cats, or-"

Badou allowed himself a smile as he closed his eye again, ready to slip back into a state of somewhat sleepiness. Their voices were high pitched and grating, but more important than that, they were receding.

"-Or we could do laundry!" Giggled Luki.

Badou's peaceful smirk dissolved.

"That's a great idea, Luki!" Noki exclaimed.

Badou stood up again, yanked open the washing machine, and grabbed his pants and shirt. Slinging them over his shoulder he marched from the laundromat, grumbling under his breath. The clothes were clean enough, he'd just let them drip dry. It was a far better prospect that dealing with these things for another half hour.

He didn't notice as he left that the girls were opening the washers and climbing into them, clothes still on.

Giovanni arrived an hour and a half later, to a floor covered in suds and and a quietly crying manager. Sighing to himself as the spinning girls laughed themselves sick, he made a mental note that this was the week that _somebody_, gods help them, would be teaching the Hardcore Twins how to do laundry. Notably, that doors are to be closed, and that clothes came _off_ first.


	2. Saccharine

**Author's Notes:** A DOGS drabble for the first prompt of the DOGS prompt challenge. I'm not actually fond of Haine, but this was fun anyway. Coffee preferences are now my head-canon.

Long ago (on some days he wished it was shorter, so he could say he didn't know the psycho with the eyepatch), when Badou and Haine didn't know each other that well, Badou took a guess.

"You take coffee black, don't you?"

Haine had shook his head and, if he were a different sort of person, perhaps he would have chuckled. As it was he just levelled a gaze at his partner and asked for one cream, two sugars.

He had no idea what it was about him that seemed to make people think that he drank black coffee, but it had happened more than once. In reality (for a given value of reality, these days), he hated it. He had trouble getting down anything more bitter than milk, but refrained from telling people this. Whatever it was about him that made people think he liked black coffee seemed to be the same thing that made his job so easy.

It was happening again, right before his (functioning) eyes. Bishop's hands were steadier than those of most with working eyes, and though it was full to the brim not a drop of coffee was spilled. "Enjoy!" Chirped the blonde man, leaving the last cup at the table of three. Haine looked up and grunted, reaching towards the sugar in the middle of the table.

But now, he was faced with a dilemma of greatest importance: He only tolerated coffee, even with sugar and cream, to be polite. And for wake-up purposes, of course. If he doesn't drink it, Bishop will know (somehow, somehow he always knows) and whine and whimper about how his dear little guest doesn't appreciate his efforts to make him feel at home with offerings of delightful beverages.

Or something like that.

So he needs to get it down, but he can't add cream to something that's already overflowing, and for the first (second third fourth) time in his life his asking for help.

"Naoto," He says, turning. "Would you mind taking a sip of this for me?"

And he notices, for the first time, that _her_ coffee is almost white, and there are dozens of empty paper squares scattered around the cup, and she's ripping open another one even as he speaks. She follows his gaze and smiles her usual tight smile and asks, quietly, "What do _you_ think?"

Before he can reply, his own coffee cup is plucked from his outstretched hand, from it's position of offering in a different direction.

Calmly, gracefully and above all sweetly, Nill sips away a third of Haine's (above all) black coffee. It doesn't happen often but Haine somehow lets surprise slip across his face as she hands what's left of the scalding liquid back to him. He's about to thank her for doing him a favour, however small, when he notices that her own cup is black as jet and she's taken not a single paper packet.

Which is for the best, he grumbles to himself as he rummages through those left in the little glass bowl. Now Naoto's side of the table has at least twenty empty packets strewn about (but then, she's so good at leaving things empty and crumpled on the ground around her, it's what she does). The only thing left in the bowl is saccharine, too sweet for Haine's taste.

He sighs quietly and hands the cup back to Nill, who gives him a smile as a 'thank you' (the only kind she can give) and sips it demurely. He takes the opportunity to aim a glare at Naoto, who shrugs it off.

"Some like their coffee to be drinkable, you know." She offers him a sip of hers and he can almost feel his tongue shrivel at the thought.

He accepts anyway, much to his later regret.


End file.
